Every once in a while the utter bankruptcy of our current cultural elite's infatuation with moral relativism and post-modernism is revealed in some unexpected way. We have all become familiar with the "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" nonsense, but sometimes the vapidity and internal contradictions that underly such malevolent memes becomes unmistakable.
I have always loved the movies. I still enjoy a good movie though have less and less time and inclination to go to the theater. This is a function of preferring to watch movies at home and the failure of Hollywood to have much of interest to say. However, I still read movie reviews hoping to find a gem or two amidst the fluff.
Yesterday Stephen Holden, the movie reviewer for the paper of record, reviewed The Witnesses. The title of the review says it all:
Mehdi and Sarah and Adrien and Manu, Coupling Under a Cloud
The French director André Téchiné is a master at evoking personality quirks, the unpredictability of relationships and the haphazard way love affairs, friendships and social groups form and dissolve. Many of his films, like “Changing Times” and “Wild Reeds,” portray a multicultural environment in which French and North African characters mingle, sometimes uneasily.
His films are also casually sensual. The fluid sexuality of at least one male character in most Téchiné films is almost a given; the director’s strong, free-spirited women are in charge of their own sexuality to a degree rarely found in American movies, unless those women are designated as vixens. But if the world according to Téchiné is a liberated wonderland with few boundaries, living there comfortably requires that you wear sophisticated psychological armor.
I am not averse to putting on my "sophisticated psychological armor" (whatever that means) and I must admit to some curiosity about the "fluid sexuality of at least one male character" and the "strong, free-spirited women in charge of their own sexuality". The movie is French so it is only fair to expect sophistication and nuance.
However, apparently the movie takes place at a rather remarkable time that I remember quite well and in the depiction of the times and the various problematic, dare I say "moral", issues evoked and provoked by the times, Stephen Holden and André Téchiné evince a moral blindness that is somewhat breath taking.
I have commented in the past that it is a extremely difficult to construct a coherent morality without resort to an external, effectively idealized, deity. Even if you do not believe in any consensus version of G_d, he has the virtue of defining morality. Thou shall and Thou shall not are reasonably unambiguous. Without the clarity offered by traditional religiously grounded conceptions of morality, it is not impossible to construct a moral system but it is certainly more difficult to construct one that is relatively universal and independent of one's narcissistic psychology. In other words, I could argue that murder is wrong because it is inimical to self-interests of a majority of the population, but it is readily apparent that if the majority then decides that murder of objectionable individuals is desirable, it can then easily become acceptable morality.
Back to Holden's review of The Witnesses:
... “The Witnesses,” set in 1984, observes this wonderland shocked out of its complacency by the arrival of AIDS. Suddenly a closely knit group of friends — straight, gay and bisexual — is forced to confront the uncertainties and terrors of the epidemic in its early days. It is imperative that they disclose their discreetly kept sexual secrets and report their H.I.V. status.
This story of paradise lost begins with a domestic spat in the Paris residence of a handsome couple: Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart), a well-to-do writer of children’s books, and her working-class husband, Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a hard-nosed police inspector of North African descent. Mehdi is outraged at Sarah’s indifference to their newborn baby, whose cries she tunes out with earplugs while she works. Sarah and Mehdi have a pact: both are allowed to take outside lovers in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” arrangement that seems to work, although it is not without its subliminal tensions.
I won't ruin the movie by describing how the various pan-sexual permutations emerge and flow. However, as someone who was there in the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and saw the devastation of the disease in the early 1980s, when a diagnosis of HIV was a death sentence, I must admit that Holden's conclusion was quite disturbing:
The heaviest moment is a bitter argument between Mehdi and Adrien in which the policeman accuses the doctor, now a leader in the fight against AIDS, of being jealous of his affair with Manu and of basking in his role of noble crusader and medical know-it-all. Adrien fires back that Mehdi, in his reluctance to get an AIDS test and to tell Sarah about the affair, is a selfish coward. Each is only half right.
When Sarah is eventually informed of the affair, her curiosity about its details becomes obsessive, and she begins writing an adult novel based on the dying Manu’s AIDS journal.
But Mr. Téchiné refuses to pass moral judgment on any human behavior pertaining to love and desire. His recognition that these things are transient and constantly changing frees him to take a longer view.
The scene must have been "heavy" indeed. Surely, "heavy" is the proper word to describe the life and death consequences of Mehdi's affair with an HIV-infected gay man. Luckily we have Holden, and if he is being accurate, Téchiné, to illustrate to those of us who might take issue with the characterization, that there is a moral equivalence between the jealous Doctor who desires the gay, HIV infected Manu while apparently seeking the glory of fighting against this tragic illness, and the policeman who is actively exposing his wife to a disease that was nearly 100% fatal at the time and consigned its victims to a horrible deteriorating illness. I am comforted knowing that sophisticated morality and psychological armor allow one to see the nuances that I apparently miss.
Additionally, perhaps only those benighted naifs so unsophisticated as to take umbrage at the curdled narcissism of a couple who spawn a child yet evince no particular interest in its well-being, might notice that there is something a bit awry about a mother putting in earplugs so as to better ignore her baby's intrusive wailing. It is unclear what actually enrages Mehdi about this, but I suspect it is just that early in the movie he has not yet developed the sophistication that comes from an affair with an attractive gay man. Such is what passes for character development in a sophisticated movie.
To those "secular humanists" who believe all morality derives from the caring and loving of the community, who oppose all violence because it is never "the answer", the kind of morality that is so elastic as to consign a man putting his wife's life at risk for his momentary pleasure to the "heaviest moment" is no morality recognizable as deserving the name.
A talented director who truly has artistic ability should ideally reveal to us the depths that lie under the narcissism of his characters. In the early 1980s, the gay community lived in terror of AIDS. Casual affairs could be "punished" by death sentences. The fear in the gay community was palpable.
In 1983 I treated a gay man who had just been diagnosed with HIV. He was bright, young, talented, and exceptionally good looking. He could have become a star in one of Téchiné's movies. I was called in to see this 27 year old man because he was resigned and refused to fight against his illness. He passively accepted his medications but clearly had resigned himself to an early death. As it turned out his entire life was about loss. His parents died when he was very young. As an adult, almost everyone he knew and cared about was either ill or terrified of becoming ill. He had literally lost count of how many of his friends had already died from AIDS. We worked together for several months up until his final hospitalization. Therapy helped him deal with his decline and enabled him to appreciate that his powerful, unconscious wishes to reunite with all his lost loved ones were making his final days more difficult. He was able to take more control of his care and as a result we were able to minimize his suffering. At the end, death was a relief for him. Would that Téchiné could have told his story.
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